As you’re no doubt aware I mothballed the grand Zero project a couple of years ago, having solved every available problem facing us and other species. I kept myself busy, securing Scottish independence, writing a spectacularly unsuccessful screenplay to be read by no one, and ending a spectacularly unsuccessful relationship to devote more time to dying alone. All was going swimmingly. Until Thursday.

As I peered out of the Zero bunker, keen for a spot of fresh air after my 30-month exile, I happened upon an internet and caught up with how things have been going. People, you’ve fucked things up good and proper. Undeterred by five years of Tory-lite coalition you went for a full on Tory majority. Undeterred by history, logic, reason and decency you’re heading for a Donald Trump presidency and a Boris Johnson premiership, and in your spare time you killed basically anyone capable of making music, film, art and telly. But the EU referendum takes the biscuit. Probably literally; Bahlsen were pricey enough already without colossal import tariffs, there’ll be no getting them now.

I wasn’t all that informed about the EU but when The Daily Mail, Donald Trump, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage all tell you to get out, you know to stay clinging to the ankles of Europe as hard as you can. But England’s disaffected lurched to the right, met the racists and xenophobes who’d always been there, and shit got real. Now we’re on our way out, a little island of Little Englanders left alone.

I am gutted. As gutted as when Bush got reelected. As hopeless as when the Tories got back in, stripped welfare to the bone, brought in the bedroom tax among their flagship cruelties. As useless and as irrelevant and ignored and as Other as on a bleak and shitty September morning a couple years back. And I am guilty. I voted, but that’s all I did. I got lazy. I didn’t read enough. Didn’t do enough. I didn’t knock a single door or change a single mind.

I’ve had a couple days of self-pity, another round of referendum hangover. I listened to sad songs, to angry Nina Simone: England Goddam. I got out my Yes gear, put on my t-shirt like a security blanket. I ate ice cream from the tub. And not with a spoon, either, I was like a bear with a jar of honey. I broke up with England again, that hateful, abusive partner. But even in self-pity I felt a pang of hypocrisy. Brexiters wanted out of a union they felt didn’t represent them, that felt distant and disconnected from their worries. I did that in 2014 and will do again when we get the chance, as now seems likely. All that sets us apart is that my worries aren’t mostly bullshit from the side of a lying bus.

But I’m past all that. I’m back, and on the lookout for which bottoms we should kick first. And it’s touching to learn how deeply I was missed. Logging in to the Zero site, I had literally hundreds of thousands of comments waiting for me, most of which I assume were demanding my triumphant return, though the few I read were mostly offering me knock-off handbags and easy money and giant packs of cock pills. Point is, I’m back on it. Onward, Zeroes, to victory!

You’ll recall I’ve often said you’ll recall us banging on about the bedroom tax, the government’s effort to reduce the housing benefit bill by giving less housing benefit to people who need it. Here, people lose 14 percent of their benefit for having a spare bedroom and 25 percent for having two spare bedrooms, with the definition of spare rooms including those inhabited by children under the age of ten. It’s a quality piece of work from the people who brought you the knackering of the NHS and the deranged misery of the Atos assessments.

Back in April I joined a public meeting that was looking to get interest stirred up in fighting it. It seemed a grassroots movement was building, with local organisations springing up all over the place. They managed a decent march through the city before joining with other groups to form the Scottish Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation. I’d link to their website but they don’t appear to have one, choosing instead to fight the good fight on the frontlines of 1997. They held a rally yesterday in the centre of Glasgow, having had another march knocked back because there were already two being held that day. They aimed to get people from across the country in a whole Scotland rally, bringing a spot of unity to what risks being a fractured and fractious campaign. I joined them, making my way from Grenyarnia to Glasgow, a city in which much of my Zeroing has taken place though only by chance and not by anything that might suggest where I actually live.

I’ll be honest here, gang: it wasn’t very inspiring. There were a few thousand people making up a pretty slack crowd that drifted and thinned as the thing went on. It was all a bit repetitive, with speaker after speaker saying the same thing, all of which we agreed with but none of which we actually needed to hear. This was preaching very slowly and very repetitively to the choir. And if the point was publicity and a decent crowd photo, there’s not much online today to suggest they got either. Plus there was this guy:

He’s a pretty serious anarchist, him. He’s a dangerous subversive. You can tell because of that comic book he’s read and/or film he’s seen. He needs that mask. He can’t have the pigs identifying him, not with the anti-establishment way he holds his placard at peaceful, legally-organised rallies. He’s probably heard of 4Chan! He’s probably hacked Anonymous! Bless his heart.

But there was also anger and, if not a sense of renewed momentum, then at least a sense that this thing is still going even if it’s stalled a little. The thing is the bedroom tax affects hundreds of thousands of people but they’re still only a small minority. For this thing to work we need people who aren’t affected by it to get angry and join them, for the numbers to swell and the force of momentum to become irresistible. We need a campaign that’s impassioned and organized, one that’s robust and credible and impossible to shout down or argue against or undermine or discredit with cheap shots and diversions.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the worlds of politics, economics and horrific injustices, or if you’ve just been attempting to live in this country at this point in time under this particular government, you’ll have heard about this recession/depression/excuse to impose ideologically-driven cuts to services. The austerity programme that’s designed to turn the economy around while coincidentally satisfying many of the Tories’ ambitions on class warfare has seen some tremendous successes. Not economically, obviously – it’s a disaster by about every measure imaginable – but in screwing over poor people, vital services and basic hope. In our previous times together we’ve ranted about welfare cuts and how they’ll screw people, the bedroom tax and the little sense it makes and the rise of payday loans and the obvious exploitation they represent. For as long as there’s misery knocking about the rants will keep on coming.

Austerity isn’t working. Obviously it isn’t working. If it were working we’d see at least some sign of it working. What we’re seeing instead is sign after sign of it not working, and quote after quote from Cameron and Osborne saying they’ll stay the course as if we’re supposed to admire their stubbornness in the face of failure. This is two rich, privileged people screwing over the poor either because they want to or because they’re too afraid of saying “Oops”.

While the economy continues to do very little in the way of improving, one sector at least is thriving: food banks. This is what we’re resorting to to counter this assault on the poor. In Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Isles and London, in one of the richest countries in the known world, in the age of iPads and botox, we have people begging at food banks to avoid starving to death or stealing to live. The Trussell Trust, which knows about these kinds of things, reckons there’s been a 76% rise in the number of food banks in the last year and a 170% rise in the numbers of people using them. They’re talking 346,992 people in the last year, just over a third of them children. Figures from 2009-10, from back before this government took over and started tearing strips off welfare, were at 40,898. That’s about a 750% increase in the lifetime of this government, this government that’s staying the course.

We should be ashamed of this. We should be ashamed we’re having to resort to this. We should be so angry about this we should be suffering losses of tens of millions of people to rage-related head explosions. We should be so embarrassed our collective blush should make the planets revolve around us thinking maybe we’re a new sun. And somewhere in there we should be maybe half proud people are putting these things together. Trussell, which likes a bit of Jesus but plays it down enough so’s you’d hardly know, reckons 30,000 donors and volunteers are helping out across the country, giving more than 3,400 tonnes of food last year. This is people seeing their communities struggling, pitching in as if poor people are fellow humans in need of a hand. It’s a decent thing they’re doing, even if it’s a lousy thing they’re being decent about, even if their decency shouldn’t be called on. And if Cameron tries to pass this off as The Big Society I’ll kick him square in the cock.

There’s a food bank opened up near us now, a couple minutes walk from social work. We had an email telling us how to use it when service users pitch up saying they’ve got no food for their children and no money to buy any. It’s getting harder to give them money now, with budgets getting tighter and destitution more in fashion thanks to the likes of the bedroom tax. Instead of getting money they’ll go to a needle exchange and ask for cans of beans so they don’t go hungry. It’s a new humiliation for people probably used to being humiliated.

Lousy as it is, it’s the Chazza of the Month. A few quid from me should buy a few cans of stuff; all non-perishable, though it won’t be lying around long. I’ll get a few cans of beans, a few cans of soup, maybe some pasta and some long-life milk. All veggie stuff, obviously. Shitty as this is I’m not above using it for a bit of social engineering.

As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.

Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.

You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.

Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.

In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.

When last we met I was banging on about politicising the office, turning a bunch of disaffected social workers into an army of right-on activists taking to the streets. You’ll recall the plan was to splash images of the prophet Gore around the place to get some interest going in yer basic environmentalism, bombard them with information about the bedroom tax and how it’ll affect our service users to get them into the politics, and have them heading a protest march by the end of the month. This plan, as good as it was, has undergone a number of changes. I chose instead to perform a more intimate form of awareness-raising, staging a bed-in in which I was joined, in place of Yoko Ono, by the flu, a chest infection, suspected whooping cough and colossal amounts of self-pity. It’s been less effective than I’d hoped.

Before I was struck down in what is very sadly my prime I’d gone along to a public meeting that was looking to organise this march against the bedroom tax, flanked by some guy who’d told me about it and some other guy who follows me around like a second bumhole. You’ll recall the bedroom tax is the government’s latest wheeze to screw over the people who dare use the welfare system designed for people exactly like them. It looks to withhold housing benefit from people with unoccupied bedrooms, working on the assumption all those Daily Mail stories about benefit claimants in mansions are not only true but typical. It looks to hurt a disproportionate number of disabled people, this being Iain Duncan Smith’s consolation for failing to turn 101 cancer patients into that fancy coat he wanted.

It was my first time at this kind of thing. It was equal parts interesting, exciting and cringey. Certainly all the activist stereotypes were there: the worthy types getting all flustered and excited like revolution was upon us; the angry types getting all loud and ranty and shoutier than thou; the self-promoters making it all about them; the veterans still fighting Thatcher; the would-be anarchists talking up riots and vandalism, having come from the office via Pret. Lots of vanity talk. Lots of people having a moment. And not one concise fucker in the room. Everyone who spoke made a good point fairly quickly, liked the round of applause they got and banged on for ten minutes trying for another. For the budding activist looking to keep hold of modesty and self-awareness it was all a bit trying. For the cynical bastard it was all a bit fish and barrel. But cynicism kills this kind of thing. I put it aside.

Then they brought on Tommy Sheridan. You’ll recall he’s the former socialist MSP who was jailed for his folk-hero protests against the poll tax and the Faslane nuclear base. And also for his perjury in the defamation trial following the News of the World’s allegations he attended a swinger’s club. He’s a little toxic, our Tommy. He’s easy to discredit. He could, by association, discredit the campaign. He could be off-putting to people with only half an interest in it. And he could be eyeing this as his chance to get back in the spotlight. All things considered, him being involved is like taking a dump in a jacuzzi and asking everyone to jump in. That said, he was a great speaker. He made actual points. He stayed focused. He made useful comparisons to past campaigns without sounding stuck in the past. He urged the organisers to get organised. I agreed with basically everything he said, and wished someone else had said it all.

On 16 April a petition is being submitted to the Scottish Parliament calling on the SNP government to use its power to counter the threat of eviction for rent arrears in local authority tenancies. I’ll be part of the crowd outside Holyrood cheering it on, assuming I’m not struck down by smallpox or gout.

So there I was, all ready to announce Kiva as the Chazza of the Month for a second non-consecutive time when what should appear but a classic spot of Zero angst?

You’ll recall how Kiva is a microfinance outfit offering loans to people in developing countries and how I’ve bigged them up a couple of times already. So far I’ve loaned to Rosaura Tuñoque Santisteban’s general store in Peru, the Santa Lucia Group’s clothing business in Nicaragua, the Kunthea Hun Village Bank Group’s vegetable plot in Cambodia, Malikie Kanu’s food store in Sierra Leone, Luka Ngoti Hahunyu’s car repair place in Kenya and Rose’s egg, water and milk shop in Rwanda, and felt pretty good about my noble self doing it. The loans have all been returned to me now, like a boomerang of justice flung by an aborigine of morality round a kangaroo of reversible poverty, in a metaphor so strained it’s got a hefty case of haemorrhoids. Point is, I’ve got money waiting to go back out into the world and do good.

That’s about where the wobble kicked in. After that last rant about payday lenders being arseholes the worries I’ve had about microfinance went from being vague floaty things at the back of my mind to being slightly less vague, marginally firmer things on a list of other things to consider thinking about at some point in time when I can be bothered. There are two worries at work here: the interest people are expected to pay, and whether the loans actually do any long-term, world-improving, future-fixing good.

Like the likes of Wonga, the fees and interest on these things can be fairly hefty. Kiva reckons high interest is in the bones of microfinance, that it’s needed to cover the costs of making small loans. There’s a degree of sense in that, and a spot of maths that adds up to something halfway convincing. Kiva says sorting a loan of $100 costs about the same as a loan of $500 but the transactional costs come off as disproportionate for the hundred bucks. A hypothetical $30 charge would show as 6 percent for the $500 borrower but 30 percent for the $100 borrower.

Thing is, the examples Kiva gives are only hypothetical and then vague on top of that, making them less transparent than the arseholes I was banging on about last week. I can’t find how much people actually pay back for the money they borrow. Dig into repayment schedules, they only total the amount loaned with no mention of the interest. This matters. If Kiva and the Wonga-likes have the same basic business model it feels like a cheat to say one’s a big hearted doer of good and the other’s a lousy, exploitative bag of bastards. And adding to this you’ve got Wonga supporting Kiva, slapping the logo on its website like they’re arseholes in a pod. Serenity now!

The closest I can get to resolving the interest thing is going through CARE International which does its own microfinance via Lend With Care. It says affiliated Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) typically charge between 20 percent and 30 percent interest which, if true of Kiva’s MFIs, would make their hypothetical 30 percent at least less hypothetical if no less vague. And if we’re talking highs of 30 percent we’re far enough from Wonga’s trillion percent to relax a little about the interest.

Next up is the worry about whether the loans actually do any good. Here we wade into economic and development theory so complicated it makes my bumhole sting. Some say it’s cool, others say it’s not. I’ve simplified their positions slightly. That aside there’s basic logic that says if someone’s getting a loan to buy stock for their shop, and that shop’s not new, and they’re not looking to expand but just to fill shelves, then the shop’s not making the money it should and maybe a loan won’t help that much. But, again, there’s not much in the way of detail so maybe these are always new businesses or always businesses looking to expand.

Maybe it comes down to trust. I’m not a fan of that kind of thing, not since I lent that hobo my car so he could take his sick dog to its audition at the circus, their own car having been stolen by a friend of Douglas Hurd. They said they’d only need it for an afternoon. It’s been twelve years. But I trust CARE International and Kiva gets top marks from Charity Navigator, so maybe trust will have to do.

As for Kiva’s affiliation with Wonga, I’m willing to write that off as just the kind of bad-taste blowjob charities have to give corporations to stay funded and Kiva’s not unique in that. The charity I used to work for once took money from Nestlé in a corporate blowie so distasteful I downed two bottles of Listerine and still had an aftertaste of dead babies.

Main thing is there’s only about 90 minutes of October left and I need my bed. By which I mean congratulations to Kiva, the official, undisputed Chazza of the Month.

It’s fair to say I’ve been banging on a bit about poverty recently, what with all those articles about the government assault on welfare and charities covering the gaps and such and such, and while this sentence started out with the intention of apologising for all my banging on it’s looking more like ending on a justification for it because banging on’s what you get for me being around poverty all day and everyone else voting Tory. Poverty, as I was saying, is shit. Poverty breeds desperation. Desperation’s just waiting to be exploited. And the world will never run out of people looking to exploit the desperate and the poor because the world will never run out of arseholes.

As people near the end of the month, or the end of the fortnight if they’re on benefits, cash starts to run out; maybe because there’s not much to begin with, maybe because they’ve not been shown how to manage money or maybe, if we’re not afraid of sounding too much like the Daily Mail, because they’ve not got a great sense of responsibility. Here’s where the doorstep and payday lenders kick in. These are the arseholes who offer cash to poor people with interest rates so high Chewbacca couldn’t reach them on a stepladder and tippy toes. We’re talking the likes of Provident, Shopacheck, Wonga and a band of other arseholes just like them. Most cases I work, these companies make an appearance.

The interest they charge is astonishing. Shopacheck gives an example of how borrowing £300 for 32 weeks would cost £180 in interest. Wonga shows how if you borrow £400 for just 31 days you’ll repay £129 in interest. Their representative APR stands at 4,214 percent. As a general rule I’d say if there’s a comma in your interest rate it’s a couple digits too high. In the absence of alternatives, for people desperate enough to go to these arseholes these are crippling interests rates that stay crippling long after payday comes back around. Fall short one month, go to Shopacheck, you’ll be falling short for close to eight months. Repeat borrowers get caught in a cycle, forever a month behind, left with a fraction of the money they could have kept.

A few weeks back, before I took my largely unnoticed sabbatical and all hell broke loose in the world of light entertainment, Panorama ran a show about these arseholes. It showed vulnerable people with diminished capacity talked into loans they didn’t need, people well into their second decade of repayments that started with a loan of close to bugger all. Naturally, Provident issued a statement saying everything in the world of Provident was not only fine but also dandy, and making out how everything we’d seen actually happen in the show was probably just a trick of the light.

The morality here’s in the sewers. Specifically the sewers of the 19th century, where Charles Dickens’s poos float past with populist contempt. This is people doing lousy things to other people because they like money better than they like people. They know what they’re doing, getting rich off the poverty of others. And business is booming. Last month Wonga said their profits over the past year had shot up to £45 million. That’s a rise of 269 percent, the kind of increase you’d usually only see if you borrowed twenty quid off them for half an hour.

The amazing thing is these arseholes are actually regulated. They’re not, technically, loan sharks. They’re okayed, regulated lenders. For those of you with an interest in semantics, when Direct.gov warns people about loan sharks they describe them as giving loans on very bad terms (check) with an extortionate rate of interest (with you) and harassing you if you get behind with your repayments (yep). There’s a fairly fine line at work here. True, Wonga does less in the way of leg breaking but when that’s your only claim to the moral high ground you know you’re in trouble.

The more amazing thing is, according to these arseholes’ websites, their customer feedback places them somewhere around awesome. Wonga reckons 92% of surveyed customers would recommend it to a friend. Shopacheck reckons 94% of its customers are satisfied with its service. And when I talk to people about these arseholes, generally they see them as a viable way of getting through. And I find that horrifically sad. People being exploited, and people thinking they’re being done a favour.

So what’s a Zero to do? Not much, really. Just tell people not to use them and hope they don’t.

When last we met I was banging on about poverty and how cuts to services are making things worse and how charities are picking up the slack, and getting all right-on and ranty and shooting a barrel-load of fish like a pescatarian Charlton Heston on an all-American killing spree. Perhaps sensing I hadn’t been sufficiently depressed by it all, the welfare rights people in the office set up an information session on how changes to the benefits system are going to affect our service users, a morning about as uplifting as your average bout of bone cancer.

They started with Housing Benefit, the one for people on low or no incomes struggling to make rent. There are a couple of changes coming that will helpfully make poor people poorer, vulnerable kids more vulnerable and a whole heap of people more likely to end up homeless. It’s the kind of social policy you’d assume has not been created by government so much as pooped from Hitler’s bumhole into Satan’s mouth and through the mouths and bumholes of Margaret Thatcher and the staff of the Daily Mail, Human Centipede style.

From April 2013, people will lose 14 percent of their Housing Benefit for having a spare bedroom and 25 percent for having two or more spare bedrooms. The definitions of spare come from the aforementioned mouths and bumholes and are suitably malicious. If people have a couple of kids who move out, the bumholes say they have to downsize or lose their 14 percent. If people have two kids under ten with a bedroom each, the bumholes say they should be sharing and lose their 14 percent. If people are foster carers and the rooms they’ve set aside for a stream of kids in varying degrees of crisis are empty, they lose their 14 percent. Also from April 2013, Housing Benefit will be paid to claimants rather than directly to landlords or the gender-neutral equivalents. That’s actually a decent move for responsible claimants wanting more in the way of independence but a disaster for chaotic families who struggle to go a day without blowing their cash on crack. Any social worker who’s done a duty shift will tell you how some people spend their benefits on the day they arrive and then claim destitution for the likes of food and heating. They’ll now have a few hundred quid more to blow, and even Mr Magoo has the foresight to figure landlords won’t see it and children who at least had homes, even if they didn’t have food in them, will now face eviction.

Next up was Employment and Support Allowance, the replacement for Incapacity Benefit similar to having a hot poker jabbed in your eye being the replacement for having a cold poker jabbed in your bumhole. Contribution-based ESA is now only good for a year, the hope being chronic illnesses will stop dicking around and only last for 365 consecutive days and ill people in relationships will become wholly dependent on their partners. Fortunately, fewer people than feared will have to suffer that indignity as tougher criteria means loads of ill and disabled people will be kicked off ESA long before their year’s up. Then there was the Social Fund no longer offering cookers and beds to people who need them. Then the arbitrary benefits cap to round down everyone’s suffering to the same level. Then how benefits will be paid to only one person in each house to give abusive men more power and abused women less means for escape.

It’s hard to describe the sense of doom and foreboding in the office after that morning-long shitfest. It was like being thrown into a dystopian future sci-fi thing, like seeing the Eloi pushing the Morlocks underground, like Biff Tannen walking into Downing Street with his Sports Almanac and declaring himself in charge. This is an ideological assault on the poor, the ill and disabled. This is the government confusing benefit claimants and benefit fraud, figuring they’re the same thing. This is their lousy, hateful “incentive to work” agenda, the incentive being if you can’t work you’re almost completely fucked. And there’s no carrot, just stick. And the stick’s covered in barbed wire and stinging nettles. And it’s not actually a stick, it’s Iain Duncan-Smith’s cruelty-induced erection.

The thing with this here social work is you see an awful lot of people’s awful lots in life. The stuff you read about and don’t think about and mostly never see. Child abuse, obviously. Domestic violence, like how we talked about. Poverty. Real poverty. Bare floorboards poverty. Eating food or making rent but never both poverty. Oxfam reckons 1 in 5 people in the UK are living below the poverty line, living hard and unhappy lives made harder and unhappier by cuts to services that mean the help they used to get isn’t around any more.

Poverty’s rubbish. It’s depressing and humiliating. It’s bad for your health and for kids’ development. It brings violence. It kills you sooner. Poverty means kids skipping breakfast, skipping lunch at weekends when schools aren’t around to feed them. The country’s full of these miseries and the government’s piling miseries upon them, making out cuts to services are the only way of fixing the problem services didn’t get us into.

As a social worker I’m supposed to be part of the solution. Sometimes I am. If someone comes to the office claiming destitution and I can’t prove them wrong and they’ve got kids they might get a few quid. If someone comes to the office claiming destitution and I can’t prove them wrong but they’ve not got kids they won’t get anything unless they can drum up another crisis or two, like a spot of severe mental illness. More often now the solution’s being outsourced to charities. We send people to the Salvation Army for a bit of free food and to a furniture recycler that gives out decent stuff for a few quid. And we apply to Buttle UK, a cracking charity I hadn’t heard of ten weeks ago and now rely on.

They give small grants to people who need them, providing things so basic we should be embarrassed they have to. They give people beds, bedding, cookers, washing machines and fridge freezers, and cash to buy vital bits and pieces we barely even think about having. If they didn’t, people wouldn’t have them. They get to be the Chazza of the Month. You can help them continue their low-key awesomeness by donating a few quid. And, yes, you could argue it’s shocking to have to turn to charity to get this kind of help for vulnerable families, but then you’re a pinko Commie. Its no better than they deserve given their colossal tax evasion, massive fraud and lead role in the global financial crisis.

And so, all being well, I’ve made it to the end of this here social work course. I handed in my dissertation after a run of long days, short nights and endless, endless tedium, the results say I did okay and now it’s just a matter of waiting for the graduation to be absolutely sure I don’t have to do that shit any more. Let’s hope I don’t jinx myself by blogging about it too soon. Or by building my new house on that old Indian burial ground I just bought.

You’ll recall, or at least politely pretend to recall, that my dissertation was looking into the horrors of social work with asylum seekers, on account of how asylum legislation stops workers being able to help some of the most shat upon people in society. I am, you could argue, slagging off a career I’ve not even started in yet, biting the hand before it even gets a chance to feed me. However, correct as you’d be, your well-put metaphor would have little effect on me, on account of how I’m a complete prick.

My study, which was so insignificant and so poorly cobbled together it should really only be mentioned between derisive speech marks and accompanied by a smirk and the sound of a slide whistle, might do some good after all. It found stacks of unmet need and that service was more dependent on the attitudes of social workers than on the policies and legislation they’re supposed to follow, suggesting two things: first, that some workers are resisting the repressive and punitive role demanded of them to give a decent amount of help to people who need it; and, second, that others are arseholes. The “study” is now in the hands of a voluntary agency that works with asylum seekers, giving them a spot of ammo to take to at least one local authority and demand a bit of the old ultra-equality.

Of course, the point of all this studying, poverty, squalor and age-inappropriate Pot Noodles was to get a job as a full on proper social worker, ensuing my do-gooderness could take place between the hours of 9 and 5 and not just in the evenings, at weekends, and long after my assassination at the hands of Bill O’Reilly, via my band of sorrowful mourners trying to keep my legacy alive. Looks like that’s sorted; a couple of weeks ago I was offered a job in a children and families team and as soon as my references are forged and my criminal record edited to include only the most light-hearted of public order offences, I’ll be getting started.

It’ll mean protecting children from neglectful or abusive parents, working with families to get them to better futures, and taking kids from the worst of people and finagling an adoption or two. I’ll be in a smallish local authority with a hefty share of problems, the name of which cannot be revealed in the interests of ensuring my secret identity remains secret. I will, however, confirm it’s in one of the three local authorities neighbouring my own. The other two being Middlesex and St Ives.

And so, while the media continues to give social work a kicking, and people I tell about it look either scared or appalled, I’m all set to start; a situation of unlimited opportunity best expressed through the medium of three contemplative dots. Like these ones…